Ethiopia Bench Maji Gesha G1 Natural Coffee

Ethiopia Bench Maji Gesha G1 Natural Coffee

This amazing variety comes from Gesha Village, located in the dense jungles of the Bench Maji Zone in the far western reaches of Ethiopia. Sweet floral aromatics, an intense sweetness with a lingering aftertaste.

 

The Story of Gesha Village

Near the border of South Sudan, you find the wild, dense, and stunning forests of the Bench Maji Zone, a home to the radiant Gesha coffees. A coffee that surprise coffee drinkers around the world with crisp acidity and rich profiles.

Rachel Samuel and Adam Overton developed a passion for coffee while producing a documentary about Ethiopian coffee in 2007. They fell in love with Ethiopia, its people, and the coffee. Their path led them to Willem Boot, a coffee educator, and an authority in the field of Gesha coffees.

After intense training, they returned to Bench Maji to search for the perfect spot for a coffee farm. After months of searching, they found a beautiful untouched piece of lush land; the future Gesha Village. Just a stone’s throw away from the birth grounds of the famous Panamanian Geisha. In 2011, Rachel and Adam finally revived the legend of the Ethiopian Gesha coffee.

Gesha Village is a 471-hectare farm with high elevation, ample rainfall, temperate climates, and fruitful ground. Rachel and Adam started to select wild Gesha seeds from the neighboring Gori Gesha forest and planted these among the indigenous trees.

 

Produced from trees of the rare Ethiopia-derived botanical variety Gesha (also Geisha) by Adam and Rachel Overton. With its generally elongated beans and distinctive fruity and crisp, the Gesha variety continues to distinguish itself as one of the world’s most unique coffees. Although the Gesha variety originated in Ethiopia, it was “discovered” by the coffee world in 2004 growing in Boquete, Panama, and Panama continues to dominate the expanding world of Gesha.

 

The process

Dry process seems simple: pick the fruit, lay it out in the sun until it turns from red to brown to near-back, and then hull off the thick, dried outer layer in one step to reveal the green bean. It is a method suited to arid regions, where the sun and heat can dry the seed inside the intact fruit skin.

 
It's often referred to as "natural coffee" because of its simplicity, and because the fruit remains intact and undisturbed, a bit like drying grapes into raisins. Since it requires minimal investment, the dry process method is a default to create cheap commodity-grade coffee in areas that have the right climate capable of drying the fruit and seed.
 

But it fails in humid or wet regions. If the drying isn't progressing fast enough, the fruit degrades, rots or molds.

Dry-processed coffees can also be wildly inconsistent. If you want a cleanly-fruited, sweet, intense cup, the dry process takes more hand labor than the wet process. Even the most careful pickers will take green unripe or semi-ripe coffee off the branch as they pick red, ripe cherry. If these are not removed in the first days of drying, the green turns to brown, which is hard to distinguish from the ripe fruit.

 

Here’s a brewing recipe from our roaster team. You can try this and enhance your coffee experience!

Brewing Recipe:
Method: Hand Drip
Water Temp: 92℃ - 94℃
Water ratio 1:15 (16g coffee to 240g water)
Grind size: Medium
Blooming 25- 30sec

 
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